It all failed.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets in Brazil Tuesday in a show of support on independence day for President Jair Bolsonaro, who is locked in an all-out political battle with institutions including the Supreme Court.
Anti-Bolsonaro protesters also gathered for huge demonstrations in cities across the country, making the annual national day festivities a high-risk event, with just over a year to go to elections that polls currently put the far-right president on track to lose.
Bolsonaro, whose popularity is at an all-time low, is seeking to fire up his base and flex his political muscle in the face of a flagging economy, soaring unemployment and inflation, and a series of investigations targeting him and his inner circle.
With hardline supporters urging a military intervention to give Bolsonaro unfettered power, there are fears the day's rallies could turn violent, with echoes of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in support of former president Donald Trump -- to whom Bolsonaro is often compared.
The main difference, and main worry, seems to be that he has the military on side. Trump never did; at least at the higher level. (Loose nuts like Flynn excepted, of course.)
HANOI--Vietnam jailed a man on Monday for five years for breaking strict COVID-19 quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported.Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial at the People’s Court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.
Vietnam has been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, tight border restrictions and strict quarantine. But new clusters of infections since late April have tarnished that record.
“Tung traveled back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City... and breached the 21-day quarantine regulations,” the news agency said.
“Tung infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” it added.
While on COVID: there seems to be some online fighting going on about whether that Bangladesh study into the effect of mask wearing is really a well designed and statistically convincing one, or not. I read this guy's take on the matter and I am inclined to think it is significant. And yeah, even though the effect was only to reduce infections by 10%, in context:
While the effect may seem small, the results offer a glimpse of just how much masks matter, Mobarak said.
"A 30-percent increase in mask-wearing led to a 10 percent drop in Covid, so imagine if there was a 100-percent increase — if everybody wore a mask and we saw a 100-percent change," he said.
The study’s authors — led by principal investigators Abaluck, Laura Kwong, Steve Luby, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Ashley Styczynski — a globe-spanning team that includes researchers from Yale, Stanford and the Bangladeshi nonprofit GreenVoice, emphasized that this did not mean masks were only 9.3 percent effective.
“I think a big error would be to read this study and to say, ‘Oh, masks can only prevent 10 percent of symptomatic infections,’ ” Abaluck said. The number would probably be several times higher if masking were universal, he said.
Yeah, seems to me to be good evidence for mandating mask wearing, at least in some scenarios. (Schools, I would expect.)
HANOI--Vietnam jailed a man on Monday for five years for breaking strict COVID-19 quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported.
Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial at the People’s Court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.
Vietnam has been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, tight border restrictions and strict quarantine. But new clusters of infections since late April have tarnished that record.
“Tung traveled back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City... and breached the 21-day quarantine regulations,” the news agency said.
“Tung infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” it added.
I had noticed Trumpy Right wingers citing the opinion of the (now dead) inventor of the PCR test as proving that it's useless or misleading as a COVID test. I never looked into it in detail: obviously, culture warriors of the Right are gullible and cling to anything, no matter how stupid, that they think supports their "independent thinking"; and the actual medical authorities saying that PCR is really the test to use were just always likely to be right.
So yeah, I didn't really realise how nutty the inventor of PCR had gone, until I read this article. Highlights include an encounter with a glowing talking raccoon (probably an alien using a screen memory), and having his life saved by an astral travelling woman he later met for a sexual hook up.
All very, very plausible.
[...hi Tim, although I'm not even sure if you care. :)]
Anyway, this last weekend I only got through Act 1 of Götterdämmerung and didn't have time to finish.
The story has taken a turn I wasn't quite expecting - with the new love between Siegfried and Brunnhilde (literally, just one night old) the subject of interference by the very oddly named (even by Wagnerian standards) Gibichungs.
I really liked the orchestral bit when Siegfried sets off on the Rhine - it's back to the first theme in the first opera, of course, and elaborated at some length. And, as people said in their commentary on watching the whole cycle, by this stage, you really start to enjoy recognising the prior themes popping up, even briefly, and being mixed up.
I hope the end of the world in flames lives up to its hype...
I smell a strong whiff of Murdoch-ian playing both sides of the fence for economic gain in this potentially (kinda, sorta, maybe) big news today reported in the SMH:
News Corp Australia, an influential player in Australia’s decade-long climate wars, will end its long-standing editorial hostility towards carbon reduction policies and advocate for the world’s leading economies to hit net zero emissions by 2050.
The owner of some of the nation’s most-read newspapers, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and 24-hour news channel Sky News Australia will from mid-October begin a company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year.
Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire has faced growing international condemnation and pressure from advertisers over its editorial stance on climate change, which has long cast doubt over the science behind global warming and has since 2007 attacked various federal government efforts to reduce emissions....
From October 17, the company will run a two-week campaign that will advocate for a carbon net zero target to be reached by 2050, which is expected to focus heavily on jobs in a decarbonised economy, particularly blue-collar industries such as mining, resources and agriculture. The campaign, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans who spoke anonymously because they are confidential, said it will be fronted by news.com.au columnist and former Studio 10 host, Joe Hildebrand.
Several sources said Sky News will support the cause that will feature across the metropolitan tabloid mastheads. The Hildebrand-led campaign will not appear in the national masthead, The Australian, they said, but the newspaper will continue to temper its editorial stance on the issue.
The Australian wingnut Right already doesn't think Hildebrand isn't one of them - any campaign by him will be readily ignored.
The far, far bigger issue is this:
A plan has been devised to limit – but not muzzle – dissenting voices among News Corp’s stable of conservative commentators, who will be expected to reframe their political arguments both in print and on its subscription news channel, which is now broadcast across regional Australia on free-to-air on WIN.
Well, it's impossible to imagine Bolt, Jones and the idiot show that is Outsiders "re-framing" their climate science denial in any meaningful way. If the Murdochs successfully muzzle them on the issue, well and good. But I can't see it happening.
My prediction for years that flooding will be a key factor in convincing people and governments that dangerous climate change is real seems to be getting vindicated repeatedly this year:
Why is my screenshot not always capturing the image in a tweet now? It's annoying.
One of the most surprising bits of research of recent years has been that about the effect of people staring into eyes.
It seems that robot gaze even has an effect:
In most everyday life situations, the brain needs to engage not only in making decisions but also in anticipating and predicting the behavior of others. In such contexts, gaze can be highly informative about others’ intentions, goals, and upcoming decisions. Here, we investigated whether a humanoid robot’s gaze (mutual or averted) influences the way people strategically reason in a social decision-making context. Specifically, participants played a strategic game with the robot iCub while we measured their behavior and neural activity by means of electroencephalography (EEG). Participants were slower to respond when iCub established mutual gaze before their decision, relative to averted gaze. This was associated with a higher decision threshold in the drift diffusion model and accompanied by more synchronized EEG alpha activity. In addition, we found that participants reasoned about the robot’s actions in both conditions. However, those who mostly experienced the averted gaze were more likely to adopt a self-oriented strategy, and their neural activity showed higher sensitivity to outcomes. Together, these findings suggest that robot gaze acts as a strong social signal for humans, modulating response times, decision threshold, neural synchronization, as well as choice strategies and sensitivity to outcomes. This has strong implications for all contexts involving human-robot interaction, from robotics to clinical applications.Update: hey, this reminds me - I recently got around to watching the modest budget, but pretty good, science fiction movie Ex Machina on Netflix. Staring into a robot's eyes is a key part of that movie. I recommend it.
I find it hard to believe that anyone of moderate Conservative values (say, Douthat), can run a credible defence of the Texas anti abortion law as being good for society when it operates by enabling private actions against abortion. From Axios:
Details: Texas' Senate Bill 8 does not provide any exceptions for rape of incest. It also allows for people to sue anyone suspected of helping a person to obtain an abortion, regardless of whether they have a direct relationship with the person or not.
- Those who are successful can be awarded at least $10,000.
- Texas Right to Life set up a "whistleblower" website where people can submit tips on individuals that they believe are violating the law...
Texas' abortion ban is hard to challenge because the state is not the one enforcing the law, private citizens are.
- "The Constitution, including Roe v. Wade, only applies against the government, it doesn’t apply against private individuals," Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law expert at Harvard, told TIME.
- "That’s what makes this really dangerous. It’s a kind of vigilante justice, circumventing all of the mechanisms we have for making sure that the law is enforced fairly, and that it’s not enforced in a way that violates people’s rights," Tribe added.
And this:
This video about the odd, sometimes long lasting, side effect of COVID 19 called parosmia (whereby normal food smells become unpleasant) is well done and quite interesting:
I saw a link to this article last week - it would seem that, perhaps after toying with softening official attitudes to gay relationships (I had posted not so long ago about the surprisingly sympathetic treatment given to the issue on some CGTN Youtube stories from 3 years ago), the government that thinks it can control everything is now trying to dissuade public discussion of it, and actually did place media control over its depiction from 2016:
Earlier this month, China's do-everything app (which is also a leading social media platform) WeChat permanently suspended the official accounts of more than a dozen LGBTQ+ campus advocacy groups. The move was part of the Chinese state's tightening grip over civil society, but also indicative of a rising backlash toward LGBTQ+ rights within the general population.And further in the article:
In February 2016, the Chinese gay series Heroin (known in Chinese as Addicted, 上瘾 shàngyǐn) was banned from broadcasting online. In 2018, Sina Weibo declared a ban on all LGBT-related issues — though the state-owned Party newspaper People’s Daily came to the defense of individual citizens, offering a glimpse into the inconsistent and contradictory stances on the matter within the state apparatus. State censors also barred the Beijing International Film Festival from screening Call Me by Your Name, the Oscar-winning movie revolving around a same-sex couple....
One may be tempted to view the backlash toward LGBTQ+ content and viewpoints as entirely state-driven, yet this would be an oversimplification. Several prominent Weibo influencers took to gloating over the government’s recent censure of campus LGBTQ+ groups, with blogger Zǐwǔxiáshì 子午侠士 declaring that they were “so glad that the government is finally taking some action on the LGBT organizations.” Elsewhere, conservative, reactionary voices have celebrated the elimination of what they deem to be the perversion and distortion of established sexual norms and family values.
Many more have come to associate the movement with perceived foreign interference and Western meddling in China’s “domestic affairs” — a motif oft-recycled by official sources and leading media figures alike in castigating ideals deemed to be “Western” or “anti-Chinese.”
So, their new wave of nationalism may well be behind the new "let's never talk about this again" attitude.
Yet the article indicates public sympathy has already taken a very Western path:
According to sociologist and LGBT+ advocate Pān Suímíng’s 潘绥铭 research, in 2006, 52.2% of surveyed respondents disagreed with the statement, “Homosexuals should be completely equal to other people,” a percentage that declined to 28.3% by 2015. The percentage of individuals reporting a “strong desire to have sexual relations with someone of the same sex” increased from 1.3% in 2000 to 5.1% in 2015.
Those last figures sound a bit dubious, but still.
And meanwhile, someone has posted this about the new online games restrictions:
Over at Nature, there's a story about a study of the genetic profile of a large number of people which tentatively finds:
....genetic patterns that could be associated with homosexual behaviour, and showed how these might also help people to find different-sex mates, and reproduce.But the limitations of the study are really more interesting that their results. I'll extract some parts, first explaining what they did:
Evolutionary geneticist Brendan Zietsch at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues used data from the UK Biobank, the US National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and the company 23andMe, based in Sunnyvale, California, which sequence genomes and use questionnaires to collect information from their participants. The team analysed the genomes of 477,522 people who said they had had sex at least once with someone of the same sex, then compared these genomes with those of 358,426 people who said they’d only had heterosexual sex. ....
Zietsch and his team decided to test whether these genetic patterns might provide an evolutionary edge by increasing a person’s number of sexual partners. They sorted the participants who had only had heterosexual sex by the number of partners they said they had had, and found that those with numerous partners tended to share some of the markers that the team had found in people who had had a same-sex partner.
The researchers also found that people who’d had same-sex encounters shared genetic markers with people who described themselves as risk-taking and open to new experiences. And there was a small overlap between heterosexual people who had genes linked to same-sex behaviour and those whom interviewers rated as physically attractive. Zietsch suggests that traits such as charisma and sex drive could also share genes that overlap with same-sex behaviour, but he says that those traits were not included in the data, so “we’re just guessing”.
Doesn't take much to think of problems with this study:
All of the participants lived in the United Kingdom or United States, and were of European descent. And the databases’ questionnaires asked about sexual behaviour, not sexual attraction. Most of the participants were born during a time when homosexuality was either illegal or culturally taboo in their countries, so many people who were attracted to others of the same sex might never have actually acted on their attraction, and could therefore have ended up in the wrong group in the study.....
Julia Monk, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, thinks that these caveats are so important that the paper can’t draw any real conclusions about genetics and sexual orientation. Sexual behaviour and reproduction, she says, occupy a different place in modern societies than they did for human ancestors, so it’s difficult to infer their role in our evolution. For instance, people might engage with more sexual partners now that sexually transmitted diseases can be cured. And the existence of birth control and fertility treatments negates many of the reproductive advantages that genes might provide. “It’s clear that people’s behaviour when it comes to sex and reproduction is highly culturally informed, and maybe digging into genetics is next to impossible,” Monk says....
Dean Hamer, a retired geneticist in Haleiwa, Hawaii, who published some of the first studies on the genetics of sexual orientation, is disappointed with the study. Defining sexual orientation on the basis of a single same-sex encounter is not a useful way of categorizing people, he says, because many people who identify as heterosexual have experimented with a same-sex partner. “You’re not even asking the right people the right question,” Hamer says. Instead, he thinks the researchers have found genetic markers associated with openness to new experiences, which could explain the overlap between people who have had a homosexual partner and heterosexual people who have had many partners.
Yes, I can see how hugely complicated it must be to draw any firm conclusions from such studies.
